


an empty gun

by sparxwrites



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Panic Attacks, Suicidal Thoughts, canon character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-05
Updated: 2016-10-05
Packaged: 2018-08-19 17:55:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8219893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparxwrites/pseuds/sparxwrites
Summary: “So,” says Scanlan, when he finally finds Percy. He’s high up on the ramparts of Castle Whitestone, on the thin walkway that runs behind the crenellated wall, just… standing. Watching. His coat, still torn through with bullet holes and stained russet-red with dried blood, his blood, flaps faintly in the breeze. “I’m sure the others aren’t going to appreciate me telling you this, but we found that letter of yours.”(In which Scanlan has a long-overdue talk with Percy.)





	

“So,” says Scanlan, when he finally finds Percy. He’s high up on the ramparts of Castle Whitestone, on the thin walkway that runs behind the crenellated wall, just… standing. Watching. His coat, still torn through with bullet holes and stained russet-red with dried blood, _his blood_ , flaps faintly in the breeze. “I’m sure the others aren’t going to appreciate me telling you this, but we found that letter of yours.”

The air up this high is cold, far colder than it is on the ground, and the wind is something fierce. It bites at exposed skin, grabs and tugs at any loose items of clothing. Though Scanlan’s sheltered somewhat by the wall, waist-height for humans and head-height for gnomes, Percy’s hair is blown back against his scalp, the tails of his coat snapping audibly behind him. In the several long seconds it takes Percy to answer, Scanlan can’t help but wonder whether his words have been stolen away by the sound of the howling almost-gale.

“Letter?” asks Percy, eventually, absently, still staring that thousand-yard-stare out over the quiet streets of Whitestone and the misty forest beyond. He doesn’t seem entirely _there_ , if Scanlan’s being honest – hasn’t since they brought him back. As though death has filed his edges down, numbed him. As though he’s _missing_ something.

Scanlan rolls his eyes. “Yes, the letter? The one you keep in your coat pocket, _open only in the event of my death_ and all that? A little morbid, perhaps, but I did like the bit where you confirmed my long-held suspicion that I am the _coolest_ member of Vox Machina and confessed your undying love for me. I’m touched, Percival, I really am. I had _no idea_ you felt that way about me.”

“Ah. Yes.” Percy doesn’t rise to the bait, and still doesn’t look down, but his gaze does sharpen somewhat. “That.” 

The sight of eyes focusing again is a relief, Scanlan has to admit, a welcome sign of intelligent life. He’s a little worried that, one day, this strange new ghost-Percy they’ve gotten back is going to disappear entirely – that he’ll stare into the middle distance, eyes blank and empty, and never stop. 

Percy exhales slowly, breath misting in the cold Whitestone air, and adjusts his glasses. It’s a nervous little gesture that has him worrying a finger over the still-cracked left lens and then tugging them off to polish the smear his touch had left. “That’s… a little embarrassing, I’ll admit,” he says, eventually. His cheeks are pinked, a little, though whether from a blush or the cold is anyone’s guess. “I’d have rather you hadn’t read- well. I’d have rather you _hadn’t_. But, I suppose it’s not… You’d have seen it eventually, I assume-”

“Percival,” Scanlan interrupts him, gently, and sighs when Percy’s mouth snaps shut with an audible _click_. “…Percy, look. I’m not stupid. I’ve been around the block a time or two, and…” He sighs again, weighing his next words on the back of his tongue for a moment before finally spitting them out. “I know a suicide note when I see one.”

He doesn’t need to be looking at Percy to feel him _freeze_.

“I’m not-” starts Percy, the automatic refusal rising so, _so easily_ in his throat before he chokes it to silence. Somehow, he doesn’t think a simple denial will fly – not with Scanlan, the most charismatic and perceptive of their little group. Doesn’t think it’s right, either, lying to these people he owes his life to several times over.

He closes his eyes. Inhales. Exhales. “It’s not that… simple.”

“You got something you want to get off your chest, kiddo?” asks Scanlan, quiet and easy, no judgement in his voice. He makes it sound easy, _so easy_ , and Percy swallows hard against the aching lump that’s suddenly settled in the base of his throat.

He curls fingers around the stone wall of the parapets, and inhales slowly. Exhales unevenly. Stares out over Whitestone again, over the town and fields and forest, and the faint shimmer of the magical dome protecting it all. A thin, flimsy layer of magic that’s the only thing keeping them from total annihilation by the Conclave. The only thing keeping his people, his city, his _sister_ , alive.

Scanlan waits, patiently.

“I wasn’t going to kill myself,” says Percy, eventually, and though his voice is polished and formal as always, it’s goddamn _small_ that it almost cracks Scanlan’s heart in two. He forgets, sometimes, just how _young_ Percy is – forgets that he has a _daughter_ who’s a similar age to him, that Percy’s really little more than a child by gnomish standards. “I can promise you that. I- I would never be so _selfish_ , not now, not with everything- I wouldn’t.”

“But you wouldn’t have minded if we hadn’t brought you back, would you?” asks Scanlan, quietly ignoring the _now_ and storing that particular piece of information for later. He knows people – and though Percy’s undoubtedly _weird_ people, as they all are, he’s still people – well enough to spot the obvious loophole in that statement.

Percy shudders at that, hard enough for Scanlan to feel the vibration against his palm when he reaches up to press a comforting hand against Percy’s thigh. “I thought- when I died, I thought- but, gods, _no_ ,” he manages, the words a little like a raw-throated gasp. “Not with Orthax. Never with Orthax.” He closes his eyes for a second, cheeks chapped red by the cold wind but the rest of his face unnaturally pale. “I am- truly grateful to you all, for saving me from that.”

There’s something hollow in his voice, empty and full of horror. It sends a shiver down Scanlan’s spine that has nothing to do with the cold, or the wind.

“Percy,” he says, reaching up to curl a small hand around as much of Percy’s wrist as he can manage. His fingers don’t manage to encircle it entirely, and Percy’s skin is ice-cold as the grave against his own warm palm – but, like this, he can feel how badly Percy’s trembling. “Percy… look, I know Keyleth asked and you wouldn’t answer, but- how _long_ was it? For you, with… him.”

“I don’t _know_.”

The words come out as a moan, wrenched up from somewhere deep inside Percy’s gut as his fingers clench tighter still against the stone of the wall. He twitches, a half-curl into himself, and for a moment Scanlan worries he’s about to vomit from the sheer force of whatever horrors are flashing behind his eyes. “Gods, I don’t _know_ , it- months, maybe? There was- there was _nothing_ , just-”

Percy gasps, hard and wrenching, pressing the back of his hand to his mouth. “It was like- like being _eaten alive_ , oh _gods_ -” 

His knees turn, abruptly, to water, and he sways forward so alarmingly that Scanlan grabs his forearm and drags him to his knees mostly on sheer _instinct_. High up on a castle’s ramparts isn’t the best place for dizziness – or, in Percy’s case, for panic, suddenly curling around his heart like a clawed crow’s-foot – and he’d rather not have Percy’s corpse on his hands for the second time in a week.

For the briefest of seconds, his mind offers him an image of Percy, fallen from the walls, splayed out and broken on the rocks below. His stomach twists, violently, and he pushes the thought from his head as abruptly as it had arrived.

“Hey,” murmurs, gently, focusing instead on the way Percy’s swayed dizzily into him. Like this, with Percy on his knees and hunched over, bowed by the weight of his pain, his head’s almost level with Scanlan’s chest. “Hey, now.” 

He’s still got one hand around Percy’s cold wrist, feeling the rabbit-thump of the human’s pulse beneath his fingers, but he brings the other up to tentatively touch Percy’s hair. It’s soft beneath his fingers, windswept, and he cards fingers through as he lets Percy lean on him. Lets Percy cry, sobs muffled by a hand over his mouth and gritted teeth and the way he’s pressed his face into the soft fabric of Scanlan’s shirt. “Better out than in, huh? Better out than in.”

He’s not sure how long they stay like that, Percy curled into him and shaking fit to fall apart. He doesn’t count the minutes, or try and break the quiet. Instead, he just keeps a hand in Percy’s hair, and an arm around his shoulders – not holding him in place, but just _holding_ him – and waits until the shaking starts to slow. In the wind and the cold atop a castle wall is possibly not the best place to deal with a breakdown, but it’s what he’s been given, and he’ll deal with what he’s got.

“…Look, kid,” he says, eventually – when Percy’s stopped trembling against him, when the gasping’s eased into breathing again, when the panic’s faded. If he notices Percy surreptitiously wiping the tear tracks from his cold, wind-pinked cheeks, he says nothing. “I know you and Vax have got this whole lone wolf thing going on- and don’t get me wrong, it’s very macho of you, we’re all _very_ impressed. But… but we’ve all seen some fucked-up shit, and done some fucked-up shit, and… well.”

Percy says nothing, but he doesn’t pull away either, stays on his knees leant into Scanlan’s chest.

“My point is, we’ve been through a lot together.” Scanlan takes his silence as permission to continue, if not encouragement. “And a lot apart, sure. Some of us more than others. But we’re _together_ now. You’ve got friends, Mr. Lone Wolf.” 

He pauses thoughtfully, rubbing an absent thumb against place behind Percy’s ear where his hair’s the softest. “Probably a family, if you want it.” Even crawling up past Percy’s hairline, there are scars, jagged lines of pale, keloided tissue hidden by white hair.

Not for the first time, Scanlan wishes they’d had the chance to be a little _slower_ killing Ripley.

Though Percy still says nothing, Scanlan feels the way he tenses at the word _family_ , and sighs. “I’m just saying,” he says, quietly, uncurling the arm from Percy’s shoulder and taking a step back to let Percy pull himself to his feet.

He still looks a little shaky, his usual formal grace marred by the way his knees half-give again and he has to catch himself on the wall. Scanlan’s lips twist slightly at the stumble, sympathetic and concerned. “ _Some of us_ are pretty good with the whole people-skills thing, but we’re not mind readers,” he says, biting back the urgent concern welling up in his throat. He has a feeling Percy wouldn’t appreciate it, not right now. “We want to help, Percy, but… you’ve got to _let_ us help you, okay? Let us in every now and then. Give the whole _relying on your friends_ thing a try, yeah?”

For a long moment, Percy just stands there. Still gripping the wall. Still staring down past it, at the village below – and at the ground, and the rocks, and the creeping moss that’s slowly growing back over them now the Briarwoods’ death-taint is gone.

“I’ll… take that under advisement,” he says, finally. His voice is rough, strained, and he won’t meet Scanlan’s gaze, cheeks still pinked with cold and crying, eyes a little bloodshot. Though he’s hesitant, he doesn’t sound _entirely_ insincere.

It’s as good as Scanlan’s going to get, probably.

Scanlan claps him on the hip, which is the highest he can reach when Percy’s stood up, and grins. “Well, I guess _consideration_ is all I can ask for,” he says, a resigned twist to his lips, botching his mimicry of Percy’s uptight accent in an attempt to get a smile out of. “Thank you for your _consideration_ , Lord de Rolo.”

He lets out a breath he didn’t realise he was holding when Percy lips twitch upwards, just a little – thin and watery, but there. “There we go,” he says, quietly, as Percy scrubs a hand over his face and draws a deep breath in. “There we go.”

When he holds out his hand, there’s a pause, for the briefest of moments. Then Percy takes it, long, cold fingers curled around Scanlan’s far warmer ones, and lets Scanlan lead him down off the wall. The steps down are steep, and a little rickety, but they make it down in one piece, and set off together towards the dining room – to where Vox Machina, and the rest of their friends, and more importantly _dinner_ , are waiting for them.

(And, if he clutches Scanlan’s hand a little too tightly, on the way down, and doesn’t let go until they reach the door of the dining hall, well… It’s not like Scanlan’s going to tell anyone.)

**Author's Note:**

> so, uh. that letter in percy’s pocket, huh? sure did read kind of like a suicide note… sure hope someone in vox machina picks up on that… sure hope this severely traumatised early-twenties kid gets some explicit mental health support real soon…
> 
> (come talk to me about dadlan and the sad gun child @sparxwrites on tumblr)


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